Shakespeare Videos

This week,my teens are working on making videos based on some pieces from Shakespeare. They’ll show the unfinished versions at our Shakespeare Club where I hope they’ll inspire other kids to make their own creations so we’ll have several of our own movies to use in our planned Shakespeare festival this spring. I love that they can study literature this way, while using their creativity and some of what they’ve been learning about making videos in their Video/Film-making Club.

My daughter’s take was to begin building a portion of a castle (seen here under construction) from Lego bricks. She pieced together a mini-figure version of Juliet and Romeo and sketched a backdrop, too, before taking lots of photos for a stop-motion video. She has plans to add dialogue though she plans to skip some of the “boring parts” of Shakespeare’s script to make a faster-paced version of the Bard’s scene.

My son is focused on a fight scene from Hamlet to be enacted also with Lego pieces. He initially planned to use some of his Star Wars mini-figures in the scene. He’s revised his plans, but is still working with mini-figures representing a different era as his characters.

I like that they pulled out a variety of books to research various scenes, each finding one they liked, devising props and scenery to fit, developing a plan to present it, and then filming and editing it. They aren’t finished yet, but they dove into this project with enthusiasm while I was able to work on chores and spend time with our toddler. What I’ve seen thus far looks promising and I think they’ll come out of it with better memories of Shakespeare than I have from high school.